Moments of Plenty– in Ground, Water, Air, and Human Contact
On New Year’s Eve, I watched fireworks from the dock in my hometown’s harbor. They were bright and beautiful, and the air had just enough chill
to make us believe that we were on the other end of the year from 4th of July.
Colorful explosions in a dark sky are wonderful mostly because they happen rarely. They are not the normal humdrum. Watching them in the right frame of mind, we can even feel our souls take flight. Or least not feel so bound to the plain old ground.
It wasn’t so long ago that the word “grounded” meant something almost exclusively negative – it might describe a plane, and all its passengers, that was somehow prevented from taking off; or a teenager who was being punished for misdeeds by being confined to home. In fact, these meanings still do hold true, I guess. More and more, however, to be “grounded” also means to be stable, to have a firm foundation, to be connected to Mother Earth, to be real. In this positive light, its opposite might be something like “flighty.” Of course, if you’re one of those passengers stuck in a plane on the runway, you sure might crave some flightiness.
In her new book with only this one word as a title, and a lovely tree depicted on the cover, the scholar Diana Butler Bass offers up a kind of sequel to her previous book that, for good reason, really got people in church circles talking: Christianity After Religion. Now, continuing to report on the revolution that has been taking place both in the pews and outside them, she explores how people everywhere are discovering that the old hierarchical view of “God up there; us down here” really doesn’t work well anymore. It’s much better, really, to feel that holiness is all around us, accessible and approachable– running right through our fingers even.
And this revolution rests upon a simple insight: God is the ground, the grounding, that which grounds us. We experience this when we understand that soil is holy, water gives life, the sky opens the imagination, our roots matter, home is a divine place, and our lives are linked with our neighbors’ and with those around the globe. This world, not heaven, is the sacred stage of our times. (p.26)
This makes perfect sense, of course, and my intention here is certainly not to give a review of this book, which has been widely acclaimed. I enjoyed reading it, found much of what I believed about the power of both Nature and Neighborhood (capitals this time, for emphasis) confirmed here, and I’m sure you would too.
There’s just one part that nagged at me throughout, and it has to do with the fact that, in my way of seeing anyway, all of the beautiful things that we perceive can be beautiful on their own, or just by our perceiving them that way. It’s pretty much the capturing of the essences around us with all of our senses, including the moments of real connectivity with others and generosity towards them, that make living worthwhile. Some of us are perpetually moved to locate, or now re-locate, God — to put him/her in the midst of everything that is most precious, or even to affirm that he/she is close during terrible tragedies, bearing it right along with us. Others, for a variety of reasons, don’t do this; partly, I think, because the moments themselves are mighty enough.
Just looking back over some images of our family’s past year, I notice
There were vegetables in the dirt…
Green fields with shadows…
There was the grandiose…
There was the small and still magnificent..
There was a boy swimming in fresh water..
Another swimming in salt water..
And a dog on a winter pond with a pink sky..
There was fire in the dark night…
A sliver of moon way up high…
And then the moments of human togetherness..
Communal activity…
Ingenuity…
And sheer joy…
All of these were pure and sufficient alone, just in themselves. Each one, I daresay, wasn’t necessarily bursting with the religious or even the spiritual. They didn’t need to be wrapped up in that language, being fulsome in what they provided, in their particular moments. And here comes a new year unfolding, containing all varieties of bright lights, waiting to explode in their own ways and in their own times, for all of us who take them in.